Re: [Condor-users] Condor on Mac OS X Tiger?

[Erik Paulson <epaulson@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, May 03, 2005 at 08:48:23PM -0500, Matt Baker wrote:
> 
> Also, I have a quick question.. one of the professors here in  
> Arkansas was wondering how well a Dual G5 XServe would act as a  
> condor server. I know condor is designed to be platform agnostic when  
> it comes to the server, but are there any things to watch out for if  
> I buy a new one and set it up for our Condor pool?
> 

By Condor server, what do you mean? A Condor central manager, or a Condor
submit machine?

A dual-G5 is a pretty powerful machine. By and large, the busiest machines in
a Condor pool are the submit machines - and the what keeps them the busiest
is jobs starting up and completing, because once a job is running all that
happens at the submit machine is a shadow process that does the occasional
queue update with runtime usage information. Job startup and completion is
expensive because Condor is moving data in and out of the machine and doing
transactions (and lots of locking) on the job queue.

For a central manager, a dual G5 XServe is overkill. The central manager 
is dominated by network latency during negotiation, and dual processors
won't help that. I'd spend my money on a couple of mac minis and run
the High-Availability extensions in 6.7 for fault tolerance instead of
buying a G5 for the central manager.

-Erik